'Let's reprise where the cuts have fallen hardest. Nearly a million young unemployed, a shocking one in five out of work.' Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

This is no time to be young. In the shadow of depression, the future could hardly look bleaker for those leaving education now, or for those coming after them. Many who jump for joy at getting their grades may emerge from university fearful about their prospects – and much worse soon for those with triple the debts. Rites of passage may become dead ends of disappointment. Some will soar – but many more than previously will not find work to match their talents, qualifications or even quite modest ambitions for a job and a home.

Historians will, I hope, be shocked that we let austerity bear down hardest on the young. No more mouthing of political platitudes that "the children are our future" in a country that is inflicting extraordinary damage on their chances, while protecting the privileges of the older and better off. In good societies it is the natural instinct to invest most in the young. Only a profoundly sick society would be doing the opposite. But there are more votes in the old than in the young and an ageing population fears and despises young people with even greater intensity than usual.

How well the riots crystallised that generation-hate. To a Manchester judge sentencing two young girls caught stealing jeans from a shop window, they were not just "selfish" but "symptomatic of the Facebook generation". As chronicled in the classic study Hooligan by Geoffrey Pearson, every generation always thinks the next is going to perdition: apprentice rioters, peaky blinders in the 1880s, teddy boys with flick knives, mods and rockers, punks, ravers – or indeed Cameron's Bullers. But each generation grows up into respectable parents, ready to be terrified to death of the next one. This time the fear and loathing is worse now the old have power, money, votes and demographics on their side.

Let's reprise where cuts have fallen hardest. Nearly a million young unemployed, a shocking one in five out of work, rises to more than 30% in places like Middlesbrough. The young will suffer for it all their lives, as research shows most never regain their footing, destined to a life in and out of low-paid work. Connexions, the service that picks up the lost and gives careers advice to all is cut to shreds: over 30% cut already, professionals replaced with cheaper staff. Just when young people most need help on what school subjects to take, on BTecs, HNDs and apprenticeships, the government is replacing careers advice with an online service, with no one to question their choices and prod them forwards. The disastrous abolition of the educational maintenance allowance will make many wrongly opt out altogether. Add in the future trouble stored up in the cuts to Sure Start, teen pregnancy prevention, anti-gang or other early interventions and prospects look bleaker still.

In what Ucas calls "the most competitive year ever", remember how 20 years ago anyone who could scrape together a couple of passes found a place on some university course somewhere, with little to pay. Once students pay the whole cost, the value of that degree needs to be cashable. Creeping credentialism means anyone without a degree competes at a disadvantage with graduates for jobs that never needed a degree before. Serious apprenticeships may look like a good alternative, but more people apply for precious BAE or Rolls-Royce places than for Oxbridge.

Other companies are offering apprenticeships to A-level students – but very few: Ernst & Young is offering 60, but that's less than 10% of their graduate intake. A high proportion of the government's new "apprenticeships" are misleadingly named: they are for over 24s, already employed, offering just three months' low-level training to care workers or supermarket cashiers, re-badged from an abolished adult training scheme. Too few employers will offer real apprenticeships to the young.

It's an odd irony, and no doubt one he feels himself, that David Willetts, author of the best book on the broken intergenerational social contract, is now responsible for making university so much harder to access. The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Stole Their Children's Future, is a devastating critique of our "selfish giant" of a postwar generation, where 45-65s hold 52% of the wealth, and the under 45s only 13%. The expansion of universities, he writes, has helped the middle classes secure their own children's advantage in "a kind of parental arms race", giving most extra places to their daughters and sons, not to working-class children. What's more, their children now marry into their own class more than before, due to "assortative mating", meeting at university, while he finds the professions all but sealed off from children of low-income families.

What this Tory is saying is that inequality got worse. That's what the A-level results show us more brutally than ever as the 6.5% of private school pupils gained three times more of the A*s that send them to top universities. Since private schools spend around three times more per pupil, that's no surprise. He happens to slice inequality between generations – but he is describing the great widening class divide we are bequeathing to the next generation.

The young pay for the financiers' calamity while my generation keeps its bus pass, winter fuel allowance and hefty state subsidy to pension contributions. If you fall below the new 50% tax rate, apart from a bit more VAT, nothing much has been taken from the likes of us to ease the national crisis. Austerity falls on the young while my generation enjoys the untaxed proceeds of three house price booms, shutting out the next generations from home ownership. The stock markets are crashing with global food and oil prices rocketing as unchecked speculators turn to commodities instead. Meanwhile the social history and geography of riots suggests more mayhem to come from the poorest places. Why wouldn't there be?

David Miliband is holding a commission on youth unemployment. Good news, since Labour needs to reinvent Roosevelt's New Deal with a universal offer of jobs and an appeal to redirect resources away from the old who have done well (not all have), towards the young with least. As Willetts found, it can be politically more palatable to approach rampant inequality through the prism of generational injustice than through class. How sad and unnatural to belong to a generation that has good reason not to envy the young.